I saw Time Bandits in the theatre as a 9 year old. A lady asked me to move one seat over so she could sit with her son. I did, and she bought me a popcorn. I've never forgotten that! Thanks, lady :). The movie was amazing. One of my all time great theatre experiences.
Time Bandits was a great film for little people. Most of the time when Hollywood casts little people, it's usually for comic relief. This movie treated them like actors and actual characters with each one having a different personality.
Dear refrigerator why are we always sooner or later? Seriously, these are the years that my awareness of film. Very early in the days of movie channels. It wasn't cable, but some scrambled antenna network. I look forward to these Friday videos. This post may have edits as I might have a comment on particular films. Sometimes you could take me hours to get through a single video. It depends on how busy my days are
Time Bandits is the most awesome film on this list. It still stands up today. I also really liked Looker due to the fact that when I was a young teen I saw it a lot on HBO during the summer of 1982.
Love the ❤ for Time Bandits. Wee fact: in the script, Palin described Agamemnon as ‘Sean Connery-type actor’ never believing Connery would do it! But he did - making himself available for a couple of days - and it’s one of his best roles. A VHS cover of TB signed for me by Palin is framed on the wall beside me right now 😊
Time Bandits is my favorite movie of all time!!!! I can hardly ever find anyone who even has heard of this movie. Josh please do an in depth analysis of this movie one day.
I remember when Time Bandits was on heavy able rotation. I have no clue how many times I watched it, because it seemed like I was always finding something new. Such a complex and thought-provoking movie with such an incredible ending.
Omg Time Bandits is one of my favorites as a kid. I’ve seen it several times and for a long time when I was a kid I had no idea what the name was. I just knew it had the kid and little people. I remember seeing it in Showtime. Takes me back for sure. I was so scared at Warners Evil warlock. He freaks me out till this day.
I watched Time Bandits with my dad a lot when I was young. He's a huge Python fan (and so am i) so he loves this film a lot too. Time Bandits is such a different animal to Brazil, one of Gilliam's other 80s films, though.
I saw CondorMan in the cinema as a kid. We arrived late and missed the start, so we stayed until the next screening to watch what we had missed and then left. I was very disappointed I didn't get to watch it all again!
That Condorman toy car definitely existed, I vividly remember having it as a kid, don't know who made it though but it was 100% real. Had it for years.
I had 100% the same parallel experience with "Condorman." Loved it as a kid even though I wasn't yet into comics (That wasn't until middle school for me, and this came out a few years earlier), but I grew up watching James Bond both in the theater and the ABC Sunday Night Movie of the Week, so there was obvious appeal. Wasn't as impressed on the re-watch of it many years later, but it was certainly entertaining. And, yes, I absolutely remember the exact same Hot Wheels car! Like probably most kids, my Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars all had nicknames like they were characters in "Death Race 2000," and I named the yellow, semi-futuristic one with the flame paint job "Condorman." Odds are pretty good that the toy designers were lifting ideas from Hollywood the same as they did Detroit. If there was a movie or tv show with a recognizable car or paint job, they lifted some elements from it and used it in their product line.
School in Crosshairs looks like something I would find on either the USA Network or TBS late at night in the mid 1980s. If you were a kid in the early 1980s, TIME BANDITS was a go to movie for instantaneous fun along with some bleakness.
Time Bandits was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre, and for years I had nightmares about god coming out of the closet. Might explain why I'm an atheist.
For the longest time, I wasn’t really sure if Time Bandits was a real movie. I remember watching it when I was really young, but my memories of it seemed like a strange dream that didn’t make any sense.
Wow, never heard of most of these flicks, but most definitely look worth checking out to me! Particularly school in the crosshairs!! I LOVE 1977's House as much as i love 1986's House, & school in the crosshairs looks equally as inventive & completely bonkers, as '77 House is!! I'd love to check out both Looker & War of the Worlds: Next Century, particularly because of their extreme relevance to modern times! Hell, even Condorman looks fun & interesting to me! In my opinion, there are some true hidden gems, from that dark period for Disney, in the '70s & '80s, when their films were constantly flopping. Well, being that Threshold is about something that actually came true, a year after the movie's release, that makes it an amazing historically important film! How often do you have something like that happen?? I still haven't seen shock treatment, but it's definitely on my list of '80s flicks to watch!!
The movie Looker was a surprise nostalgic trip for me. I haven't seen it since it was on tv back in the 80's. I remember loving it particularly because it shared my last name. I need to find this on bluray. Thank you for another great episode!!
No "Phantom Of The Opera" jokes about Condorman seeing how Woody is played by Michael Crawford? Edit: You could also do Hello, Dolly! & Wall-E jokes as Michael played Cornelius Hackle in HD and his scenes from that movie were what Wall-E kept watching in Wall-E.
One curious thing about Time Bandits is that, as a kid growing up in Britain in the 80s, I had never heard of it. It was never really on TV, and it was only really mentioned as a footnote on any retrospectives about Gilliam. Unfortunately I can't find box office numbers for how it did specifically in the UK or where it charted, but it seems like a film that was much better received in the US but kinda forgotten here.
I sort of looked into this and while I didn't find any definitive answers I have a bit of a hypothesis. The generation that would have seen this in the theaters are all in their 50s. However, no small part of the popularity of this film in the US comes from the cable broadcasts, which would have persisted longer and reached a younger audience. HBO seems to be the main company here ('80 seems to have been the first year they transitioned to a 24/7 programming lineup, so that would have made a lot of time to fill), and it looks like they didn't have international reach just yet. So my guess is HBO secured the broadcast rights but wasn't yet partnered with any networks in the UK. Ergo, younger people in the US got to see this film a lot, and in the UK it was confined almost exclusively to lads of age when the theatrical release came out.
@@LordBitememan That makes sense. I found a website showing the UK charts at the time and the box office takings, and it did really poorly. It was #3 on the first week (behind For your eyes only, and Altered states), then slipped down the charts pretty quickly. That first weekend, just taking £102k compared to the US where it got $6.5 million. Total gross in the UK was just £166k whilst in the US it did $42.4 million. So it looks like it just didn't resonate with UK audiences, and then the TV rights no doubt didn't help; no TV studio is going to deal with complex rights for a film which flopped here. It is weird though as it is a good film and should hit UK sensibilities, but just never did.
Time bandits gave me nightmares. still loved it. I don't know how a preteen can handle all of those emotional adventures. it would be too much to process. fight or flight would have kicked in at the bedroom scene. I may have to sit and watch this with my inner child to offer some adult ways to process a stressful situation. ;)
I think a good comparison for Threshold would be Jules Verne novels... At the time it was seen is a sort of completely unbelieveable fantasy, only for the technology to actually come out later
Man, I have such a huge soft spot for Shock Treatment. It's flawed as hell but it has damn catchy songs and I actually like Jessica Harper better as Janet.
Lol me and my friends took a Starlight tour in L.A. a few years ago I'm from Oklahoma but I knew several things he was saying wasn't true never trust a Hollywood tour guide! 😂😂
Shock Treatment was really hurt by an actors strike going on during filming, so a lot of the actors used were TV actors at the last minute, which didn’t help. Generally it looks like a weird TV Film made in the 80s to be watched on New Year’s Day which didn’t help it. And it felt like they were deliberately trying to make it a cult hit instead of it happening naturally which never works out. But there is some lovely ideas in there and some memorable songs. This is exactly what is screaming out for a remake!
Unsure if this was an intentional gaffe, bit in "Condorman" it's Barbara Carrera rather than Barbara Bach. Both were, however, Bond Girls in 1983 and 1977, respectively.
Can we not just leave beloved properties alone? A production where the "Bandits" aren't all played by little people? Seems familiar... I guess Dinklage really did pull up the ladder.
3/9 I actually read the novelization of Condorman (no, not the book it's supposedly based on, the actual movie tie-in) long before I saw the movie. Evil trying to learn about computers was soooo much funnier in 1981.
I don't think you can "transplant" an artificial heart. Threshold actually has a pretty interesting engineering twist that may (or may not) be biologically viable, but it's fascinating nonetheless (no, I won't spoil it). I remember the first artificial heart patient and he seemed to live a miserable life, as he had to always be attached to a large external power source.
I actually did see CONDORMAN when it first came out in the cinema. I was 14 at the time, but, I do remember that it was kind of fun, but kind of boring. As for TIME BANDITS, I saw that some time after it hit VHS. I'm going to have to give the movie a rewatch, because when I saw it back then, I didn't quite get the movie. Didn't think it was bad in anyway, I just for some reason couldn't comprehend it.
Also Time Bandits was heavily used for the classic computer RPG Ultima 2, with the main Time Bandit idea of gates being used for the rest in the series. And the Ultima series was massively influential. So TB it’s even more influential than people think!
You mighta had a hot wheels car that they used the likeness of that car lol and hey it's way....wayyy in the future of the 80s but will you cover miracle mile 1988?? Think it falls under sci-fi love that movie wish it got more attention such a cult classic! 😊
when i moved to LA, the tar pits were one of the first places i visited and i got a photo pretending to be on the phone outside the diner. (the diner is still there. the phone booth was either fake or had been removed.)
You skipped over Michael crawford in condorman. A 1970s TV comedy superstar in the UK then in the 80s a huge Broadway star in Barnum & Phantom of opera for 5 years. He's an incredible talent. Still alive at 82. I guess this was his big attempt to go from Tv success to film success. Maybe a blessing it failed cause he became a huge Broadway star instead.
I enjoy some of these obscure flicks I've never heard of BUT are you planning on doing a summer of '82 retrospective? The battle royal of all summers, with not one but all of our favorite all -time movies coming out in the span of just a few months? You do such insane research I'd love to see the behind the scenes of what went down when Blade Runner and The Thing were released same day and still were drowned out by the other dozen top shelf fantasy/horror/sci-fi that came out. And wait, your tour guide said Time Bandits was one of the worst films of all time? Well clearly he's an escaped mental patient not worthy of rebuttal.
Has anyone on the channel watch a transformers/terminator rip-off of some soldiers fighting machine or monsters that travel through a black sphere.. there is also some asian guy that dips his sword in an energy flow… 🤔
Shock Treatment is not horror. I don’t even consider it sci-if per say, it’s a satirical comedy with only like two good songs. And Looker is sci-if but I guess also horror in the way all Crichton works straddle that line.
i wouldn't say they're NOT horror, but on the spectrum of how i grade these things and figure which list to place them, they swung a bit more in the Sc-Fi/Fantasy realm for me.
Its funny you should mention the ship. When i seen this movie they stopped the movie on the ship to tell us that President Reagan had been shot. We were children and didn't care so we boooed the theatre until they put the movie back on.
